FIG. 1 depicts the floorplan of one floor of a typical office building (doorways and other details not shown) that shows the location of wireless base stations 105-1, 105-2 and 105-3 that provide wireless telecommunications service to wireless terminal 110. The walls, furniture and other objects within the building dramatically affect the propagation of radio signals such that in some parts of the building the radio signals may be so attenuated that they cannot be adequately received. Although increasing the radiated power from a transmitter can overcome such attenuation, the maximum radiated power may be restricted by law, by health considerations or by electrical limitations of the transmitter. In practice, inadequate signal coverage is addressed by adding base stations or by moving one or more existing base stations.
The process of adding or moving base stations to overcome signal strength deficiencies is fundamentally an empirical process that is helped by good test tools. Typically, a craftsperson makes an educated guess on where to add or move base stations to alleviate the deficiency. Then the craftsperson uses a test tool to measure the radio signal strength and bit error rate from each base station from the desired locations in the building to determine if the deficiency has been overcome. Typically, the test tool is an expensive piece of equipment designed specifically for measuring the radio signal propagation characteristics. Unfortunately, as indoor wireless systems become cheaper and more prevalent, such test tools are prohibitively expensive to purchase.